If you’re reading this, there are two possibilities:
- You’ll remember some piece of what you’ve read.
- You’ll be part of the majority who roll their eyes and keep moving.
I believe you’re one of the former – and it’s for you that I’m writing this:
Masters are not masters because they can do flashy things. Masters are masters because they have the freedom and bandwidth to do flashy things. This freedom is born of one thing:
Completely and utterly ingraining the basics of their medium into their habits.
As a child, I was constantly attracted to the flashy, the unique and exotic. This is the natural way our bodies respond to the environment around it. I soon learned that flashy tricks didn’t lead to good craftsmanship any more than food dye makes a cake delicious.
To truly understand how to make a great game, you must first understand its mechanics. To understand great mechanics, you must first understand the basic ones.
This is the philosophy from which everything I can hope to teach is born.
Back when I was studying isshinryu, they called that “unconscious competent.”
Learning went through four phases:
1) Unconscious Incompetent: You don’t know that you don’t know what you’re doing.
2) Conscious Incompetent: You know that you aren’t good.
3) Conscious Competent: You can do it right when you pay attention.
4) Unconscious Competent: You can do it right without thinking about it.
It’s why we would throw the same punch a hundred times a class for a hundred classes a year.
That’s an incredibly valid system for understanding how we work.
I’ve been stuck between 2 and 3 for so long on so many issues, I’m just now realizing how hard it can be to break past stage 1.
This reminds me of tennis. My dad is a tennis instructor and naturally he taught me how to play since I was a little kid. The best part about learning at such an early age is that you completely ignore steps 1, 2 and 3. You just don’t care wether you are good or bad and you rarely think about your concentration. It’s pure intuition.
As long as you are havin fun while learning, with enough practice you’ll become decent at it. It will just feel natural. It just flows.
Many people come to me and ask me how hard it was to learn to play tennis. I can’t answer.